January 2, 2017

Defund the United Nations, Real Clear Politics

Rich Lowry

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/01/02/defund_the_united_nations_132694.html

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"We've come a long way from Daniel Patrick Moynihan excoriating the U.N.'s 1975 'Zionism is racism' resolution in one of the finer exhibits of righteous indignation in the history of American speechifying.

The Obama administration acceded to - and, reportedly, assisted behind the scenes - a less notorious but still noxious Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. By the administration's lights, the action is clever - it will be extremely difficult to reverse and will increase Israel's international isolation.

But the bipartisan outrage over a resolution that, once again, demonstrates the U.N.'s hostility to our closest ally in the Middle East affords an opportunity to force an overdue crisis in the U.S.–U.N. relationship. We are the chief funder of a swollen, unaccountable U.N. apparatus that has been a gross disappointment for more than 70 years now...

We pay more than anyone else to keep the U.N. in business, about 22 percent of the U.N.'s regular budget. As Brett Schaefer of the Heritage Foundation notes, 'the U.S. is assessed more than 176 other U.N. member states combined.'

Because nothing involving the U.N. is clean or straightforward, it's hard to even know how much the U.S. pays in total into the U.N. system. But it's probably around $8 billion a year. We should withhold some significant portion of it, and demand an end to the U.N.'s institutional hostility to Israel and the implementation of reforms to increase the organization's accountability. There are individual U.N. agencies that do good work, and we can continue to support those.

Realistically, though, the U.N. will always be a disappointment. The fact is that the closest thing to what FDR envisioned in the U.N. is NATO, a like-minded group of nations that has been a force for peace, order, and freedom. This is why President-elect Donald Trump should embrace NATO and turn his critical eye to the U.N., where there is the genuine opportunity to, if nothing else, save the U.S. some money and rattle the cages of people taking advantage of our beneficence."